Life On The Web's Factory Floor

Barbara Kempf used to work on an assembly line for words. Her job: take a
company name (say, Joe's Diner), think up several words that describe it
(restaurant, dinner, burgers), come up with other words about its location
(Cincinnati, downtown, Main Street), then create more than 200 combinations of
those words and write six- to eight-word sentences associated with each
combination. The finished product? Paid search ads, or those 'sponsored
links' that show up when you search for things like 'burgers in
Cincinnati' on Google, Yahoo!, or Ask.com.

Over eight-hour shifts, the 51-year-old Kempf 'assembled' thousands of
these ads every day for $15 an hour for Marchex, a Seattle-based company that
runs online advertising campaigns for local businesses all over the US.

With the Internet advertising explosion, advertisers spent $5.1 bn last year
to place text ads such as Kempf's next to search results online. Several major
ad agencies and search engine marketing firms say they plan to double the number
of paid-search staff over the next year. Companies such as General Motors now
buy ads for upwards of 1 mn search terms. The sheer growth of Internet
advertising is requiring advertisers to scale and streamline their operations
with an almost manufacturer-like mentality.

In the process, a new category of work is emerging: the digital factory job.
Behind the seemingly magical offerings of the Internet are thousands of human
beings madly inputting data around the clock. The work ranges from the slightly
creative, such as Kempf's job of crafting sentences for ads to snag search
traffic, to the rote-typing in descriptions of hamburgers for online menus.

These digital bricklayers are in a sense building the new information
pyramid. In Madras, India, 'editors' making a fifth of the US pay work 24
hours a day, 7 days a week to digitize archived American newspapers from the
1700s to the 1980s. In Boston, New York, and Palo Alto, Calif., Google Books
workers manually turn each and every page of millions of library books so they
can be scanned and made available to any visitor to the Google website.

In Hyderabad, India, typists for startup Menupages.com type the menus of
thousands of US restaurants so that Web surfers can browse for reservation ideas
or takeout. “Internet companies are realizing that you don't need to be a
massive company to manage such operations,” says Ravi Aron, assistant
professor of operations and information management at the University of
Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He adds that process work is moving out of
traditional places -insurance claims processing, say-and onto the Web.

Just like with a display of fresh oranges in a supermarket, far more labor
goes into getting the digital product there than most people fathom. Take
ProQuest Historical Newspapers archive. Subscribers can type in an author name,
headline, or any keyword and access any original image of any article from any
historical issue of nine major US newspapers, including The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The process starts at the
company's headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich., where an operator scans reams of
microfilm through a machine that creates a digital copy of each issue. That copy
is sent overseas electronically to the shop floor at Ninestars Information
Technology, a digital conversion company in Madras.

Filling in the Blanks

There, workers like 27-year-old Virginia Deepa digitally cut up and sort the
images into individual articles. Then Deepa tags the headline, first paragraph,
caption, and author byline and runs a program to convert each into text. (The
rest of the article remains an image file.) Next her work heads to a quality
assurance employee who reads over the image file to make sure the words match
what is on the page. Then it's ready to be added to the online archive for Web
surfers to explore. That process is repeated by Ninestar's 850 employees, 24
hours a day, over three shifts.

Such menial work with data and information is hardly new. But the growing
fruits of such operations-gaining online access to historical papers, for
example, have never been so close to the fingertips of the average person.

Nor has such data entry ever been easier for companies to take advantage of,
including small entrepreneurs. The number of third-party, offshore companies
that will perform contract work has more than doubled since 2002, according to
Wharton's Aron. With Internet connectivity pushing farther into rural areas of
China and India, the cost of such work will fall even lower.

That means even more data will be flying online as startups look to fill in
the niches, leading to still more digital burger-flipping-type work. When Greg
Barton set out to start Manhattan-based Menupages.com, he contracted with a
small outfit in Hyderabad. Restaurant menus are too varied for
character-recognition software to correctly translate all of the words into
text, and mere image scans of each menu wouldn't allow users to search through
the dishes by ingredient or type of protein.

So Barton has the workers in Hyderabad sort through thousands of menus,
typing up the names and prices of appetizers, entrées, and drinks. Then the
offshore staff digitally categorizes each restaurant according to cuisine type,
price level, and neighborhood. The operation supports a small ad- sponsored Web
page, and 34 employees help him rapidly build out the company's service to
include other cities. In the past six months Barton has launched sites for San
Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, and he estimates his business can process more
than 2,000 menus a month.

Such offshore outfits can also do smaller custom jobs so that even
individuals can participate. For 5-10 cents a business card, typists at
nonprofit data processor Digital Divide Data in Laos and Cambodia enter and
correct contact information and load it onto customer-relationship management
site Salesforce.com Founded by Canadian Jeremy Hockenstein in 2001, DDD hires
poor and disabled workers in those countries to perform all kinds of data entry
for six hours a day and then get English lessons and computer training for
another six. Lately that has included work for executives at International
Finance, the World Bank's private-sector arm, as well as for individuals who
send in stacks of business cards.

Strong Web access and the low wages of a Cambodian typist-about $45 a
month-mean there's almost no barrier to entry, so almost anyone can contract
for rote work, says Hockenstein. Although DDD started with primarily large
jobs-in 2001 its workers typed the 133-year archive of The Harvard
Crimson-it is adding more small custom work.

In the US, such line work has high turnover. Google uses a temp agency to
keep Google Books staffed. Kempf, the former librarian who worked at Marchex,
quit after nine months because the 'factory-type atmosphere' got to her. Ad
writers worked on a strict weekly quota system that required them to punch out
sentence after sentence while their manager, an ex-Marine, barked at them to
type faster. “I started having anxiety attacks,” says Kempf, who has worked
as a freelance index compiler and prefers a slower pace. “I had to get out.”
A Marchex spokesperson says: “We have a very satisfied base of employees...
and allegations about being yelled at have no merit. There's a high degree of
accountability, but sometimes that's not for everybody.” Either way, there
are plenty of people willing to work behind the digital curtain, one keystroke
at a time.

By Burt Helm, with Manjeet
Kripalani in Bombay